


The Lady Vanishes

by morganya



Category: Bandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has spells where she disappears and comes back again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lady Vanishes

**Author's Note:**

> Magical realism AU. Written for the disappearing square on hc_bingo.

The first time it happens, she's setting the table for dinner. Her mom is at the stove, stirring something in a pot. Her dad and Jess are somewhere else altogether. She's six years old.

There's a plate in her hand; she's about to set it down when she loses her grip. Her fingernails turn clear and she's looking at all the bones in her hand, shock-white and surrounded by red raw meat, and then she's gone, just like that.

It only takes a second for her to come back, gasping and shuddering as her body rearranges itself to fit back into the atmosphere, and the plate shatters on the floor with a sharp crystalline sound. Her mom turns away from the stove and yells at her for being clumsy. She's too shocked to say anything.

*****

Her parents find out about it eventually. Her mom thinks she got it from her great-aunt, the one who had 'spells,' the old euphemism for being crazy as a shithouse rat. Her dad takes her to the doctor and demands to know if this is just a phase, or if they can stop her from blipping out of existence by putting her on some special diet. The doctor starts to answer but her dad sends her out of the office before he really explains anything.

"It's nothing to worry about, baby," her dad tells her later. "Nothing bad will happen to you. Just let us know when it happens again, okay?"

Jess doesn't seem to think it's weird to have a sister who periodically just isn't there anymore. Maybe she's become inured to her pesky little sister, or maybe she's just too busy with her auditions and her singing to really notice. Jess is always busy. It's because Jess is special, her parents tell her. Jess is special and she needs that little extra push that only her parents can give her. Ashlee doesn't really understand what they mean until later.

So she goes with her parents and Jess to Los Angeles instead of to dance in New York, and when her dad decides that she's going to start doing commercials, her mom comes along and makes sure to hustle her off the set if she starts to fade out in front of the camera. Eventually, it's almost easy to keep people from noticing that she's not normal.

*****  
She loses her virginity when she's sixteen. She meets this guy when he's working tech on one of Jess' tours, and they talk for a while and then he takes her out for fast food after the show. She knows enough to keep it from her parents, telling them she's going to a movie and she'll be home later.

She doesn't eat the burger he buys her but she makes a good show of pretending. When he says, "A bunch of the other guys said they'd totally go out with your sister but I told them that I'd rather go out with you," she can't feel anything but grateful. Afterwards he drives her out somewhere quiet and puts his hand under her shirt.

It's sticky and sweaty and uncomfortable, and her shoulder gets entangled in the seat belt. He doesn't come so much as he twitches sweatily, and then he pushes off of her and says, "That was great."

She smiles and says, "Great."

She feels herself fading when he's tying off the condom. She thinks, _Not here, not now, oh please_ , but her bones go hollow and she fades out entirely. When she comes back with a choking noise, he's staring at her.

"What was that?"

"Nothing. Just…just something that happens to me sometimes."

He blinks. "Does this happen every time you fuck?"

She doesn't know what to do. She definitely doesn't want to say that this was the first time for her. Finally she says, "No, babe, I didn't do that just because you stuck your dick in me."

That seems to make him mad. He drives her back to the hotel without speaking to her and she races upstairs to take a shower and maybe cry for a while before her parents notice anything.

Later, with Josh and Ryan and Braxton and Wilmer, she makes sure to hide it away, excusing herself to the ladies' room or ending the date early, just to avoid seeing that look again.

*****

Coming back is always the worst. It's as if she turns into a piece of clear tape for a minute and her body forgets how to shape itself. In the second when she comes back she feels every single nerve ending shuddering and sparking, her heart and lungs and blood jerking back into gear. She wonders if this is how being born feels, like being unceremoniously kicked into a whole new world.

*****

She fucks up on Saturday Night Live, badly, hideously, and doesn't know how to cover it. She stumbles backstage afterward and her only thought is to get _away_ , far away, somewhere safe. She goes into the dressing room and her dad's there, waiting for her.

"Daddy," she starts to say, voice going, like she's calling into a canyon. When she feels herself starting to fade it's a relief.

Her dad gets up and shakes her shoulders. "Ashlee. Ashlee. You need to get out there and handle this. You are not doing this now." His hands burn on her shoulders.

"No," she says. "Please, I can't."

"You get yourself out there right now, young lady. Don't make me tell you again."

So she goes out for the cast sendoff and says whatever she can, and her dad stands and watches her while she does it. Later he and her mom brainstorm about it in the car, how they can possibly cover her fuck-up, while she sits and stares out the window. She knows they'll talk about this no matter what she says.

Because they love her. Because they love her so very much.

*****

Pete Wentz asks her out through her publicist. She has no idea who he is at first. Her publicist gives her the basic rundown: he's in a band, had a couple well-selling singles, now he's fucking his way through every starlet on the C-list and there are some dirty pictures of him on the internet.

She's not sure about it. After what Jess went through with Nick, she doesn't think that getting another musician would be the best idea in the world. She does some strategic searching on the internet to help make up her mind.

She expects Pete to be some tall skinny rock star with pleasant Midwestern features, but all the pictures she finds are of a half-handsome, compactly-built guy with a goofy smile and sad, heavily made-up eyes. She's been making a concentrated effort to look like all the pretty Hollywood girls, fixing her weird nose and keeping her curves in check, but maybe that hasn't worked so well if this guy wants to go out with her.

He emails her a couple of times, though, and he seems kind of fun, and after the third time he's remained oblivious to her polite attempts at a brush-off, she thinks that maybe it wouldn't be so bad for them to be each other's arm candy for a while.

*****

She shows Pete her breasts the first time they go out. It's at some bar, and they've both been drinking in one of the secluded VIP booths, and after an hour and a half of awkward small talk, he says something like, "I don't think you can live in Los Angeles without a boob job. I'm thinking of getting mine done."

She says, "Well, I've done pretty well without one, wanna see?" and flips up her top. When she drops it Pete's jaw is hanging open.

She has a sudden sober thought of _Great, Ash, now he'll think you want to sleep with him_ , but as soon as he picks his jaw up from the bar, he says, "Well, that's a relief. My doctor's not exactly up on the plastic surgery, you know?"

*****

Right from the start, getting serious is never an issue. Pete seems to like her when she's silly and giggly, and there's no way she's going to make him have to deal with her emotional baggage when they're having fun. And Pete's got his own issues to deal with.

She's used to being the crazy one in the relationship, the one who has fits and sulks and spends nights freaking out over nothing. But Pete is happy to let her know that he's as much of a drama queen as she can be, and she's not sure that she's equipped to deal with that. Plus Pete takes a few too many pills for her liking.

But he's cute and he makes her laugh and he remembers the names of all her favorite candy bars without having to be reminded. It's enough to let him into her life just that much.

They play it coy in the press and giggle together over the deception.

*****

She should have known that she couldn't keep it from him forever. They get more and more comfortable with each other, which means that they're not always on their best behavior. The fights, when they come, are vicious, worse than she even imagined. Pete fights dirty when he's mad, and he's got a songwriter's gift for finding exactly the right phrase to slap into her.

They get into a fight over a dinner that she doesn't eat, whisper-shouting at each other in the middle of the restaurant. She calls him selfish; he calls her fake and shallow. She chokes on her Cosmopolitan and refuses to speak to him for the rest of the meal, which doesn't stop him from continuing to lay into her.

On the ride home, she feels it coming on, and she can't stop it no matter how much she bites the inside of her cheek and digs her nails into her palm. She thinks about jumping out of the car, but she fades out before she can reach for the handle.

She comes back with a jolt, shuddering in her seat belt, and thinks, _Fuck_. Pete is staring at her, the anger replaced with unchecked terror.

"Babe?" he says. "Where…where'd you go?"

"Sorry," she says, tongue sluggish around the words. "It's just something that happens to me sometimes, that's all."

He looks at her. "What are you talking about? That sometimes you just aren't there?"

She starts to cry. She's too angry and freaked out to even try to make it pretty, so she's gulping and choking and her nose is running while she tries to tell him that she didn't want him to know, that she didn't want him to have to deal with this too, that she isn't a fake or a liar, she just isn't, and fuck him.

Pete pulls the car over. He rubs her neck and she slumps over into his lap even though she's still kind of furious at him. He tells her he's sorry and that she was right; he's a selfish asshole and she shouldn't have to put up with it, ever. He tells her he's sorry until it's all one word, _I'msorryimsorryimsorry_ , and if he can do anything to make it up to her he'll do it right away. She gets makeup and snot all over his jeans and he doesn't even seem to care.

She's beyond embarrassed when she calms down. It's enough that Pete knows about her now, but he's also told her, obliquely, about the shit he went through growing up in Chicago, about his parents' shaky marriage and the time they decided they didn't want him around anymore. He's called himself a walking advertisement for abandonment issues. She knows if anything can make you feel alone, it's this.

She tries to say sorry when they get back to her house, when she's curled up next to him in bed and they're watching TV. He just hugs her very tightly and says, "Aren't you kind of forgetting that you're the one going through this? Jesus, Ash, how are you not scared shitless all the time?"

It's the first time that anyone's ever seemed to care how she feels about it, and she almost bursts into tears all over again. He kisses her face and offers to let her do the channel-surfing.

*****

"He does this all the time?" Jess asks her one day when they're hanging out in the house giving each other mani-pedis. Pete's on tour and bored, and he's passing the time by sending her stuff: she woke up to a bouquet of orange daisies and asters at the door and her phone beeps regularly with incoming texts that read _my pitch-perfect hooligan_ and _sharks only sleep with the mermaids_. She sends him back smiley faces and acronyms.

"It's because he's away," Ashlee says. "If he were here, he'd be talking about my tits and Hemmingway would be pooping on the rug. He gets romantic when I'm in another state." Her phone beeps and she giggles and makes a _see what I mean_ gesture.

Jess laughs and says, "It's like y'all just started dating. He's still chasing after you."

Maybe there's a little jealousy in her voice, or maybe Ashlee's imagining it. Jess is a little confused by Pete and her. Ashlee thinks that she doesn't quite get that Pete can't do anything without crashing into it, that he needs to fill every empty space with words and gifts and stupid jokes, and that she's had so many empty spaces that it makes her feel drunk to have someone actually see that emptiness. She feels drunk and reckless and adored, and she loves every second of it. This is something she can't say to Jess.

She smiles, paints a shiny line of peach down Jess' big toe and says, "We get each other."

*****

Technically, Travis is staying with Pete because they're working on an art project, but Travis also just got out of rehab and Pete's been slowly getting rid of his pills for a while now. She has a feeling that Travis coming in is more about Pete trying to keep them both safe, with the art being a bonus.

She likes Travis when he's sober. When he's fucked up he's obnoxious and often incoherent, and she likes getting reacquainted with the shy, dorky guy behind the pharmaceuticals. She tries very hard to be positive and upbeat when she goes over there to make sure they haven't drowned under their creativity, but she still sort of thinks Travis is embarrassed about being the house guest.

She stays over one night; she falls asleep waiting for Pete to come to bed and gets woken up by him passing out next to her at ten in the morning. She leaves him to sleep and goes downstairs for cereal.

Travis is standing over the coffee machine, staring at it like he thinks it's going to talk to him. She says, "Hey!"

He looks up and smiles. He looks like he hasn't slept in days. She says, "What's up?" and offers him the cereal box.

He says, "Ever noticed how Pete's like the crazy lady who feeds all the stray dogs in the neighborhood? Motherfucker can't make up his mind if he wants to save the world or his fucked up friends."

"It's probably both," she says.

"Probably. Dude, I don't know how you manage to stick with him. You're like the one perfect thing he's got."

She stops pouring the milk. She has two thoughts at once: one a flash of _yes, I fooled them again_ and the other _I don't want to keep this up_. She says, "I'm not so perfect," and before Travis can object she takes a deep breath and tells him about it as well as she can. Travis' eyes widen for a minute. Then he stoops down from his great height and hugs her very tightly, saying, "Damn, girl, how's it feel to have something in common with the fucked up people? Got any pointers to share?"

"I'll tell you when I find them out," she says.

*****

Her dad's been pushing her to do something with Pete, record a few songs together or maybe start talking to MTV about another show. She's been putting him off, saying she's too busy to think about that now and maybe when their schedules lighten up. Except now she's stuck at a family dinner and her dad's pressing her for answers.

"It'd be good for both of you, baby. Wouldn't you like to be on TV again? It'll be just like the first time, you know what it's like."

"I don't think either of us need to be on any more magazines," she says lightly, carefully. "The first show was a pain. All those cameras."

"But now you won't have to go through it alone. It'll be you and Pete, you'll be great together."

Her dad likes Pete, she thinks, sees something level-headed and business-smart behind the tattoos and tight pants. Pete likes her dad, or at least shows him respect. Pete trusts her enough to deal with her father.

"I don't think it'll work, Daddy," she says, because she might as well get it over with. "I'd kind of like to keep work out of me and Pete for now."

"It wouldn't be work," her dad says. "You'll just be being yourselves."

"I don't want to," she says. She hopes he'll leave it at that. The fact is that she doesn't want them to become another perfect popstar couple, smiling and All-American on the TV like Nick and Jess had been. This is something that's _hers_ , away from her family and her carefully crafted image, and she's fought too hard for it to have it turned into a commodity.

"Ashlee –"

Jess looks up from her dinner plate. "Daddy, she's _happy_ ," she says. "Why can't she and Pete just be happy and crazy for a while? It's not like TV's going away." Her brow furrows. "Right?"

Her dad shuts up then, outnumbered by the women at the table. Ashlee feels a sudden rush of gratitude and love for Jess, her beautiful golden big sister. She forgets, sometimes, that Jess has to be their parents' daughter too.

*****

Pete's in Chile when she finds out about the baby. Her period's late and she's feeling a little weird, so she buys a few tests and then she almost passes out in the bathroom.

She's twenty-two. She has spells where she disappears and comes back again. She's horrible at housework. Pete's only just stopped stuffing pills into himself. They're both on the road all the time. The damn dog's only half-housetrained.

She still wants this baby. She wants it very badly.

She calls Pete. She would have gotten on Skype or something, but her mind's racing too fast to even contemplate anything technological. She hits redial until he finally picks up.

"Jesus, babe, that's like the twentieth call. Is anything –"

"I'm pregnant," she says.

There's dead silence on the other end. For a second she thinks he hasn't understood her and tries to clarify, "I'm going to have a baby."

"Did you, uh, did you check?"

"I took three tests."

"I'm coming home."

"Babe, you can't."

"I'm going to."

"If you do," she says, "everyone's going to ask you why you're leaving early."

"I want to be there with you," he says, but she knows they're stuck.

"I want to…if this is really happening, I want to keep it. Try to keep it. I don't know…"

"Yeah." His voice is choked and wavery. "I'm so…please don't tell me you're fucking with me, Ash, because I'll be _pissed_."

She really loves this guy. "Come home soon."

"Yeah."

When the trip's over Pete doesn't even call her when the plane gets in. He comes tearing back to the house and bangs on the bell until she opens the door. He drops to his knees and makes a triangle of his hands, cupping her belly softly.

"Baby," he says. "Baby."

"Yeah," she says. "Baby."

In the morning he asks her to marry him. He didn't have time for a ring so he makes do with a strip of tinfoil. She says, "Are you doing this because you want to make an honest woman out of me?"

He looks at her, startled, and says, "No, I'm doing this because I want to be a better man for you."

*****

Being pregnant is the scariest thing she's ever gone through. She sails through the wedding planning without batting an eye because keeping the baby safe is the only thing on her mind. She has nightmares where she disappears and the baby's not there when she comes back. Pete keeps an eye on her when she's sleeping and she sometimes wakes from a dream to feel him stroking her hair and saying, "Everything's fine."

She feels more solid when she doesn't try to bottle things up, which means that the hormones make her go nuts as the pregnancy progresses. Pete – her husband, and that would be a really weird thought if she wasn't so focused on other things – just says the mood swings make her a yummy mummy. Sometimes she thinks that's adorable and sometimes it pisses her off.

Sometimes she lies on the bed, hands pressed to her growing stomach, and thinks, _You stay right where you are, little baby. You stay right with me_.

When she goes into labor, Pete goes to pieces. She calls the cab to take them to the hospital and physically pushes her maternity bag into his hands because otherwise he would just stay rooted to the spot, frozen like a statue. She drags him out to the cab when it comes, trying to time her steps in between contractions.

When she sees Bronx for the first time, he's bloody and wrinkled and screaming his head off, and it's incredibly gross but it's perfect. Pete's hanging onto her with one hand and holding their son close to his chest with the other, and she can't stop smiling.

*****

Bronx wakes up crying in the middle of the night, and they both shoot out of bed at the same time. Pete looks at her and says, "My turn or yours?"

"Mine, I think," she says, and goes down to the nursery.

She changes Bronx and tries to put him back down, but he fusses and clings to her, so she walks him down the hall to the bedroom, where Pete's already passed out, leg hanging off the end of the bed.

Bronx turns his face into her neck. Pete sighs and smacks his lips.

"That's right, I'm here," she says. "I'm right here."


End file.
